All the latest research on psychology, psychiatry and mental health summarised in plain English.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Could meditation make your brain grow?

Meditation has been shown to have a number of beneficial effects on people's mental and physical health. People who meditate are better at cultivating positive emotions, retaining emotional stability and living in the moment. They have better focus and control over their emotions, reduced levels of stress and better immune systems. Now a study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has found that they also have bigger brains! The study use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 22 long-term meditators and 22 control subjects. The meditators had significantly larger volumes of grey matter in different parts of the brain including the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus. But it is not clear whether meditation leads to the growth of these parts of the brain or whether people with larger brains are more attracted to meditation. So there is a need for a long-term study following changes to people's brains after they start meditating.